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Contact UsEvoluted x Sea to Summit: Brand Collaboration BTS
Full-service digital agency Evoluted recently collaborated with outdoor gear retailer Sea to Summit. But how did the collab come about, what worked well, and what were the challenges?
We speak to the agency to find out more about what happened behind the scenes…
How did the collaboration come about?
Outdoor gear brand Sea to Summit had grown a range of quality camping equipment that made them firm favourites with in-the-know outdoor enthusiasts.
But they lacked the organic visibility to reach a mass audience - and after an explosion in public interest in outdoor hobbies during COVID, they weren’t capitalising on a boom in demand for their products and relied on branded traffic.
Sea to Summit partnered with Evoluted for SEO and content marketing support to grow their visibility. They were especially keen to promote their new ‘Camp Kitchen’ range of outdoor cooking equipment, so we made this a core part of our strategy.
After identifying that the real traffic-driving potential lay in appealing to camping newcomers making generic item term searches (e.g. “sleeping bag”), rather than searching by specific manufacturers, our first priority was to reorganise the site’s design and architecture to make it novice-friendly rather than heavy with jargon.
We overhauled navigation around search demand, introducing new categories with traffic-driving potential and combining existing categories to consolidate strength, as well as making internal linking improvements to better guide users through the site.
With these foundations set, we moved on to the more creative phase of our strategy which would set Sea to Summit apart from its competitors.
Tell us more about the project?
We recognised that camping in general, and Sea to Summit’s products specifically, had huge visual appeal through aspirational lifestyle/influencer content.
As our client lacked the time internally to shoot or organise their own influencer content, we decided to make full use of Evoluted’s base in Sheffield, right next to the beautiful Peak District, to head out and gather it ourselves - with our team as models!
Besides showcasing Sea to Summit’s products, original, high-quality multimedia content would be a weapon in helping us outrank some huge domains in a competitive field; many of the top-ranking search results relied on stock images or were text-heavy and unengaging, especially for cooking-related content where we’d be competing against BBC Good Food, WeightWatchers, HelloFresh and more.
We headed out into the Peaks with an array of Sea to Summit’s products, and partnered with outdoors influencer Fell Foodie to demonstrate some of the tasty meals that could be whipped up with the Camp Kitchen product range.
After a day of filming, we returned with a wealth of high-quality photos and videos showcasing Sea to Summit’s equipment in action, including how-to recipe videos for delicious camping meals like paella, gyros and pad thai.
What worked well?
The content we produced worked brilliantly across multiple mediums - their website, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Several of the videos went on to achieve rich results on Google, helping Sea to Summit stand out in search results against far larger competitors, and generated significant reach on Instagram.
Overall, we achieved a 64% increase in organic revenue for 2022 when compared to 2020, and a 70% increase in the number of focus keywords for which Sea to Summit appeared on Google’s first page.
Our Camp Kitchen recipes and other blog content delivered over 6,000 new users to the site, generating around 20,000 video views and fuelling a 75% increase in organic revenue for the Camp Kitchen product range.
The campaign earned industry recognition including winning Content Strategy of the Year at the 2023 UK Content Awards and Best SEO Campaign at the 2022 UK Agency Awards, plus a slew of nominations at other ceremonies.
It gave our team the taste for more outside-the-box creative campaigns that go beyond the traditional remits of SEO and content marketing retainers, and gave us a great visual case study for pitching and winning more of these types of projects in future!
Any challenges?
Turns out cleaning paella spills out of a tent is harder than you’d think! We may also have been better off taking more of Sea to Summit’s warm-weather clothes in our product selection - the Peak District is always at least five degrees colder than the city centre…
As with most ideas that are a bit different, there were challenges around getting client buy-in without a proof of concept to use - but we believed in the idea so much we were prepared to organise, film, produce and edit the content ourselves.
Not managing every marketing channel for a brand means you lose oversight of every time the content is used (or isn’t used) in different scenarios, limiting the social engagement data we could use in reporting.
Any learnings post collab?
In hindsight, the Camp Kitchen project slotted neatly into the wider content shift towards authenticity. Original photo and video content is a huge asset for brands; consumers will always want to see how products look ‘in the flesh’ and influencer content can be a powerful tool especially when marketing to newcomers to a hobby as in this case.
We’ll definitely be looking for more opportunities to take creative content campaigns out of the office - sometimes playing it safe isn’t enough to break through when competition is stiff. In addition, content that can be reused across multiple channels is a great way to sell creative ideas to clients when marketing resources are limited compared to competitors’.
